The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists’ Books (review)

As the authors demonstrate in the course of their detailed study, the artist’s book is a protean genre that resists all attempts to classify or define it. To describe it simply as a book created by an artist, they rightfully declare, does not begin to do justice to the complex works discussed in these pages. Rather than demonstrate the futility of this exercise, which would have detracted from the analyses that make up the bulk of the volume, they adopt a brief working definition elaborated by Ulises Carrión. According to the latter, an artist’s book is a book “conceived as an expressive unity, that is to say, where the message is the sum of all materials and formal elements” (7). In other words, the Huberts add, it constitutes an “artifact rather than a vehicle for documentation or fiction.” Conceived as an art object, it derives its identity not from the words on the page but from its material existence. Despite the similarity in nomenclature, the artist’s book differs significantly from the livre d’artiste which, although the two may occasionally coincide, is governed by a separate set of rules. In the latter genre, texts and illustrations comment on each other repeatedly, creating a complex interartistic dialogue. In the former, verbal and visual elements conspire with each other to create an organic whole which, despite Carrión’s assertion, is greater than the sum of its parts.